ASK HR: My employer pays lip service to our feedback
How can we raise our voices and get the attention of our employer?
Every year, our company conducts a staff engagement survey to get our views on what we like and don’t like as employees. This has been happening since I joined the company five years ago. At first we were excited to get an opportunity to speak openly without fear of backlash, but now we do not care since the suggestions we give have mostly been ignored. How else could we raise our voices and get the attention of our employer?
Engagement surveys have become reliable tools for employers to take a pulse on staff level of commitment to the organisation. The key objective of such surveys is to receive objective feedback on what is working well, needs to be sustained, and what is not working well and must stop. This is also a great platform to listen and tap into new ways of making the workplace more conducive for staff.
In this era of hybrid work structure, employee feedback has become a reliable source of information to employers. The biggest secret to making the process benefit all stakeholders is listening and acting. If employees have given feedback on issues that concern them, it is futile to sit back and do nothing, yet move quickly to launch another survey simply to tick a box. The employees lose faith in the process and participation drops. The opposite is true, when staff see transparency in the process, their feedback being taken seriously, they will participate and share more. Transparency starts from sharing survey reports or its highlights and the management’s action plan as well as the employee’s role in the process.
Since your employer’s priorities are not aligned properly in this process, you may consider other ways of provoking feedback. You could seek audience with the team responsible for initiating surveys, or the management and share your concerns. It will be important to be clear on your points of concerns, such as highlighting issues that concern you, say the work environment or access to training. It could also be behaviour that limits productivity or lack of transparency or feedback on critical decisions.
It would be useful to also highlight what is working well and needs to be maintained. Since the channels chosen by the employer are not delivering outcomes that support your work, you proactively seeking solutions, if there is fear of retaliation, make use of your whistleblower policy. If you have employee representatives, use them to speak on your behalf. I am pleased to see you are seeking solutions. Help your employer to realise the value of feedback. Employees have a powerful voice that should not be silenced, and great employers know that.
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